Measuring the Usage of SaaS Applications based on Utilized Features

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an online delivery of software to customers as a service. The interest in adopting SaaS has been rapidly increasing due to the advantages of SaaS. Current SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com charge their customers based on the type of the edition and on the number of users. Many customers are not satisfied with the current pricing model and are requesting to pay according to the actual usage of the SaaS application. SaaS vendors are looking to implement a metering solution that measures the computational resources such as the CPU, memory and transactional usage as well as the utilized features of each SaaS user. This paper focuses on implementing a crucial element of the metering system which is measuring the SaaS applications based on the features utilized by each user. This is also called the Feature-